A former Meta safety engineer told a federal jury this week that company leaders repeatedly received warnings about harm to children on Facebook and Instagram and largely failed to act.
Quartz reports that Arturo Béjar, who worked as a safety engineer at Meta, testified that the company operated under what he described as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy toward child safety. He said internal studies showed children encountering harmful material at elevated rates, including recommendations that surfaced content from sexual predators and graphic violent images. Béjar said he brought these findings to Facebook and Instagram executives multiple times, and those conversations produced little meaningful change.
Béjar also testified that during his second stint at Meta, from 2019 to 2021, the company replaced the term “addiction” with “problematic use,” a framing he said did not meet the thresholds academic researchers use to define addiction. He said the metrics Meta made public gave a false picture of safety because they measured violations of content policies rather than actual harm experienced by users.
Béjar told the jury that in 2021 he emailed Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after Zuckerberg publicly stated that the company does not prioritize profit over safety. “I felt that he created a false and misleading impression of Facebook’s commitment to young people,” Béjar testified. He said he briefed Zuckerberg on product issues at least 100 times during his tenure at the company.
Béjar was the first witness called in the trial, which opened Tuesday in federal court in Oakland, California, before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The case was brought by 29 state attorneys general who allege Meta intentionally designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to minors, collected data on children under 13 without parental consent in violation of the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and misled the public about platform safety. Opening arguments were delivered by lawyers representing California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey.
Meta attorney Paul Schmidt argued that the states had selectively quoted internal documents to build a misleading narrative. He pointed to the company’s safety measures, including parental controls, privacy defaults for teenage users, and reminders encouraging users to limit time on the app.
In a prior statement to Breitbart News, a Meta spokesperson wrote:
The State AGs may call this a landmark case, but their limited claims are unsubstantiated and their financial demands are vastly disproportionate. The AGs offer no proof anyone in their states was misled, claim benign features like having an additional Instagram account somehow harmed their residents, and attempt to penalize Meta for industry-wide challenges like age verification. Rather than sticking to the facts or the law, the states have instead decided to chase an outlandish payout. We stand by our record of creating strong protections for teens, and look forward to making our case in court.
Breitbart News previously reported how states are adopting a strategy from the fight against Big Tobacco to take Meta on:
Families, school districts and other state attorneys general have filed thousands of lawsuits against Meta and other social media companies in recent years, with plaintiffs pursuing a strategy of numerous individual cases aimed at pressuring the company to change its platforms. In California, thousands of coordinated cases have been filed against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap. Meta and YouTube lost the first such case to reach trial in February, when a jury ordered them to pay $6 million to the plaintiff; TikTok and Snap had settled before trial. Two additional lawsuits set for trial this summer, one federal and one in California state court, also ended in settlements for undisclosed amounts.
The legal strategy mirrors the approach used against tobacco companies in the 1990s, which centered on cigarettes’ addictive properties and manufacturers’ knowledge of the harm they caused, ultimately resulting in a $200 billion settlement in 1998 and stricter marketing rules.
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman said the coalition intends to prove to the jury that “Meta concealed what it knew about the harm its products cause young people.” He added, “AGs are in the perfect position to get this done. We did it with the tobacco settlement in the 1990s. We did it with the companies behind the opioid crisis. We’ll do it again with Meta.”
Read more at Quartz here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.